Featured Research

from universities, journals, and other organizations

Secrets In Rare Cartography

Date:

November 20, 2007

Source:

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Summary:

Quietly housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee since 1978 is a collection of more than a million items acquired by the American Geographical Society since its inception in 1851. Half of the items are maps and charts, some dating to 15th century, and other items have come from explorer-members, such as Charles Lindbergh, Robert Peary and Theodore Roosevelt. Four AGS holdings are currently on view during the World Festival of Maps in Chicago.

Share This

The Mappamundi, the oldest original map in the AGSL holdings, was produced in 1452 by the Venetian cartographer Giovanni Leardo. The circular map, considered the finest example of a medieval wall map in the Western Hemisphere, shows the known world consisting of only Europe, Asia and Africa.

Whales were the economic drivers of the 1850s. So important was this resource that the founder of the U.S. Oceanographic Office, Matthew Fontaine Maury, created a map showing the worldwide distribution of sperm and right whales in 1851.

Related Articles

"Whale oil then was like petroleum is today," says Christopher Baruth. "This is a graphic device that showed where the whales were located by type and season."

Baruth is curator of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library, where a copy of the whale map is one of thousands of rare cartographical materials and geographical photographs.

Quietly housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) since 1978, the AGS Library contains more than a million items, half of which are maps and charts, some dating to 15th century, and some that aren't available anywhere else, even at the Library of Congress.

The value of the items in the AGS collections is compounded by their connection to the society. AGS is the oldest national geographical society in the United States, founded in 1851 in New York City.

Explorer-members, such as Charles Lindbergh, Robert Peary and Theodore Roosevelt, are among those who donated items associated with their exploits to the society over the years. Materials in the collection have been consulted not only by scholars, but also by the U.S. government during and at the end of both world wars. Today, it attracts scholars from as far away as Uzbekistan.

"It's a national treasure," says Robert McColl, professor emeritus of geography and East Asian studies at the University of Kansas, who in 2000 donated to AGSL his own geographical library, one of the best personal collections of Chinese materials in the world.

Stories of intrigue

McColl is one of the many travelers and scholars who, in addition to the famous, have helped build the collection.

"I went to China early enough that I found some items that are terribly unique, that might have disappeared otherwise," says McColl. Through his contacts in China, he found many works and maps that might have been produced in limited quantities or pulled off the market." He also found rare books, sometimes bound in silk, in flea markets. "People were selling them for food," he says.

It's like that with the contents of the AGSL, says Baruth. Each piece testifies to the adventurers, rare circumstances and history behind them -- with as much intrigue as any work of fiction found in the other stacks of the UWM Libraries.

Notable contents include a wide range of materials, from black-and-white renderings done by hand to digital spatial data, from turn-of-the-century photographs of arctic exploration to charts used by Charles Lindbergh to fly from New York to Paris in 1927.

Chicago Festival of Maps

When asked to choose a "Top 10" from the collection, Baruth shakes his head slowly and replies, "That's like asking you to rank your children."

But three of the library's possessions are on view at the Field Museum in Chicago, where the World Festival of Maps is hosting what many consider to be one of the greatest map exhibits of the century, "Maps: Finding Our Place in the World." In addition to the whale map described above, two more AGS holdings stand alongside cartographic gems from around the world at the exhibit, which runs through Jan. 27, 2008.

One is a unique manuscript map from about 1910 of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. It was drawn from memory on the back of a missionary lithograph by an Inuit named Wetalltok, and given to Robert J. Flaherty, who created the film "Nanook of the North." It is the most accurate map of the islands then extant.

The other item on loan is the Mappamundi, the oldest original map in the AGSL holdings, produced in 1452 by the Venetian cartographer Giovanni Leardo. The circular map, considered the finest example of a medieval wall map in the Western Hemisphere, shows the known world consisting of only Europe, Asia and Africa, a configuration Baruth calls a T-O map. ("Imagine a capital ' T' inside a circle separating the three continents.")

As in many medieval maps, Jerusalem is situated in the center of the Mappamundi, and the names of regions were copied from those of a second-century geographer named Claudius Ptolemy. As the Age of Discovery advanced, Ptolemy's original work was filled in and expanded by explorers, spawning new editions called "novae tabulae."

AGSL has many such editions of these "Ptolemys," including a rare original from 1478 that was printed on vellum (animal skin).

Catalog incomplete

In the mid-1970s the AGS could no longer afford to archive its holdings and chose UWM to house the collection after a national search. It took nearly five years to orchestrate the move and surmount the legal challenges.

And Baruth concedes that riches may still lie hidden in the holdings.

In the library's more recent history, Baruth unearthed two prizes from the wall-length bookshelf in his own office: a first-edition copy of "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville and a travel book given to the AGS by a young Teddy Roosevelt. Neither was found in the catalog at the time.

UWM Professor Bruce Fetter began specializing in both cartography and demography soon after UWM acquired the collection to better make use of the resource. He has been teaching a class on how to use the collection for 26 years.

"This material is essential because it affects how we see the world," says Fetter. "It is a wonderful way of getting a picture of the past."

More From ScienceDaily

More Earth & Climate News

Featured Research

Mar. 31, 2015 — The ocean is a large reservoir of dissolved organic molecules, and many of these molecules are stable against microbial utilization for hundreds to thousands of years. They contain a similar amount ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015 — Using the assessment tool ForWarn, US Forest Service researchers can monitor the growth and development of vegetation that signals winter's end and the awakening of a new growing season. Now these ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015 — Until now electric fences and trenches have proved to be the most effective way of protecting farms and villages from night time raids by hungry elephants. But researchers think they may have come up ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015 — Researchers have detected a human fingerprint deep in the Borneo rainforest in Southeast Asia. Cold winds blowing from the north carry industrial pollutants from East Asia to the equator, with ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015 — Landfills can make a profit from all their rotting waste and a new patent explains exactly how to make the most out of the stinky garbage sites. Decomposing trash produces methane, a landfill gas ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015 — As the five-year anniversary of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig approaches, a new report looks at how twenty species of wildlife are faring in the aftermath of the ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015 — Scientists have discovered why the first buds of spring come increasingly earlier as the climate changes. As the climate changes the sweet spot for seeds comes earlier in the year, so first flowers ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015 — In the 1990s the discovery of the oldest human made and completely preserved wooden hunting weapons made the Paleolithic excavation site in Schoningen internationally renowned. Contained within the ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015 — The adverse health effects caused by fine particles have been known for some time. In addition, ultrafine particles appear to play a significant role in cardiac function -- even if an individual is ... full story

Mar. 30, 2015 — Researchers have identified a new source of methane for gas hydrates -- ice-like substances found in sediment that trap methane within the crystal structure of frozen water -- in the Arctic Ocean. ... full story

Related Stories

Mar. 11, 2015 — A collection of ancient Greek and Roman coins includes an incredibly rare aureus of the Roman emperor Otho, who reigned for a mere three months. The Greek coins were struck by some of the most ... full story

Aug. 26, 2014 — On Aug. 26, 1920, with the formal adoption of the 19th Amendment, women won the right to vote. Now, a newly discovered collection of Susan B. Anthony letters will help show ... full story

Mar. 5, 2014 — We know that babies and young children often put non-food items in their mouths, a behavior that occasionally leads to swallowing of foreign objects. Metallic toys and low-cost jewelry often contain ... full story

May 11, 2010 — A unique map of the UK, showing alternative images of the general election results, has been created by researchers at the University of Sheffield. The image, which is based on population data, shows ... full story

ScienceDaily features breaking news and videos about the latest discoveries in health, technology, the environment, and more -- from major news services and leading universities, scientific journals, and research organizations.